From my perspective the main things that killed it were online shopping, as the article mentions, and computing just becoming more boring, at least from a hardware perspective. Once the iPhone came out, that became many people's primary computing device or computing peripheral. Everything you needed was just an app or software which you could download online. The great mass of consumers just need a laptop and a few commodity peripherals, and they can get all that at Walmart. Then Newegg came along and really ate the PC hobbyist market.

Eventually Fry's succumbed to the GameStop effect - their primary market is completely eaten out by online competition, so they fill their retail space with cheap garbage to make ends meet. The last few times I visited my local Fry's it was more empty shelves and cheap bargain bins than anything I was interested in buying.

It was a sad end, but not surprising. I just don't think you can justify having large specialty stores anymore when online shopping is so convenient and the options are so much more plentiful.

I still made the trip every holiday season until around 2017 but it had been going progressively downhill since about 2007. The expanded café, the drastic reduction in books and magazines, PC parts getting strip-mined and never restocked, audio/video media slowly disappearing; you could feel the shift.

I miss the SacBee flyer and the last-minute Christmas gift runs. Egghead Software, CompUSA, RadioShack, Borders (one of the only reliable places to find 2600), Tower Records...it was a different time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxPRkOdBmck

Microcenter is around now, they're not as bad but they suck. They force their cashiers to ask and demand for your personal information (phone number,address,etc..). At least online retailers won't give you dirty looks when you give them dummy info.

People are nostalgic about these places, but if they can't realize their disadvantage and at least provide decent customer experience in person, it's probably best if they went away. I wish there was a costco-like decent brick-and-mortar electronics store (costco is famous for treating it's employees well, and then having them treat customers well, as well as their wide range of high-quality items). I can order just about any piece of electronics, including things like resistors and get it within a day or two most of the times. it sure beats fighting traffic, and vying for salesperson's attention for help about an item, standing around a locked cabinet hoping someone would have the time to come and unlock it for you, so you can give them your money, standing in lines and the aforementioned cashier experience. These problems are not inherent. They are direct effects of mismanagement (except the traffic part).

Their warranty was transferable and they let you know about it. They would print the warranty paperwork out twice and give you a sticker you could put on the inside of the case for whoever ended up having the PC later it was still valid as it was the parts under warranty.

This meant that if you had a part that later on went out, like a motherboard, you could tell them the warranty information or show up at the store with the PC and they would figure it out. I thought this would be garbage like how Apple or Best Buy just wants you to buy a new one and try to scam you out of warranty replacement, but they actually would replace the part as needed and if that part no longer existed they would replace it with a similar one. I took a PC back there that had a motherboard under warranty that stopped working and that motherboard no longer existed, so they dutifully went and found a motherboard that had those same minimum features and substituted it without a cost.

A term was coined for this: “re-Fryed.” As in, “don't buy that video card! It’s been re-Fryed!”

That, combined with a good friend of mine passing on rumors of the company treating their employees poorly (my friend said that he would choose to shop elsewhere rather than Fry's if he had any choice, and since the Fry's was near his house while the Microcenter was a 30-minute drive away, that meant he was giving up convenience for principle)... well, I started shopping at Microcenter too until I took this overseas job. So I wasn't too surprised to learn of Fry's demise: the writing had apparently been on the wall for years.

When news came that they had shut down I was entirely unsurprised.

COVID might have sped things up a little but that location at least was on its last legs.

Note: I went to the one in Tustin, CA. No idea what the SV one is like or the originals in Ohio.

This was not a surprise

But online shopping became so convenient, more and more of my purchases started going through Newegg and Amazon.

I used to think of the sales staff as the United Nations of Fry's. It was always thrilling to see someone starting their American dream, even if the service was haphazard.

Good lord. The nearest Radio Shack (17 miles away) closed, so to get a resistor or cap, it's "order online". That's about as environmentally sound as nuclear testing above ground (perhaps a slight hyperbole there).

But not all that far-fetched. One time, I visited my daughter's place and found a broken wire in the thermostat, so I drove to the Shack, got a cheap iron and solder and fixed it. (When there WAS a Radio Shack)

I replaced my old Nikon F2 with a refurbished FM that cost less than the repairs. Go to buy some color slide or black and white film. Same store (and lucky to have one within 50 miles). "We don't carry those"

"America Online" ... indeed.

For my own speculation, I think one of the key differentiating factors is that every MicroCenter I've been to has always felt like it was slightly too small, and that probably helped insulate it from the empty store effect that seems to have hit Fry's hard.

Years later I entered a store, and somehow it was already nostalgic then :)

So weird, I haven't thought Fry's for the past 20 years.

> There was something about wandering the aisles and seeing the merchandise and getting ideas

That. Exactly.

I’d beg my dad to drive me to them on a Friday night. Great times!

Too many return trips eats up any profit reselling parts to my clients.

But it was a blast back in the day when I could get shrinkwrap tubing, RAM modules, individual electronics components (resistors, capacitors, etc.) personal care items like combs, brushes, snacks, etc.

And then there were the books... With a cafe built into the store. I spent a lot of time and money at a number of the Silicon Valley Frys locations.

PS: I worked at Egghead Software until it closed (killed by Fry's and CompUSA) before starting my own IT consulting company that put me through college.

In that era the stores (the ones I visited at least) had surprisingly robust stock. Well into the 00s I found SCSI cables, ADB devices, and even old software from the 90s. If I needed pretty much any random component for a PC, Mac, or electronics I could probably find it at Fry's. No other stores had that sort of selection.

By the 2010s Fry's was far inferior to NewEgg and the like. Trying to shop there became a frustrating experience. Even just browsing the aisles got worse. When they went consignment only there was no reason to step foot in one. It was aisle after aisle of nothing.